Never has it been easier and cheaper to host your own cablemodem
webserver. Cable companies aren't big on giving out this
information, since they say "we don't support home
networks." They may not support them, but at least where I
live, they don't prohibit them. What this means is, along with
receiving very fast cablemodem access for your PC, you can host your own
webserver, for the price of the former (for me, that's $32/month for what
peaks out at 650K/sec or better). I had been looking into a
co-location situation (about $100/month) and the cost of an ISP with
sufficient harddrive space (at least one gigabyte; about $300/month) and
found these to be too much to pay, without the benefits of easy transfers
from my non-linear editor computer to the server. When I finish with
my Adobe Premiere video, I can transfer it to my server without delay (at
10 or 100mb/sec).
Here's "The Cablemodem Webserver Solution":
- Acquire cablemodem access through your local cable company and
get your computer working with it; (for me, $32/month over my normal
cable TV bill). Get it working with their support help. Then do
the following, without telling your cablemodem company what you're up
to.
- Acquire a Linksys cablemodem router and download and install the
latest firmware from the Linksys site. The cheaper one comes
with one network port and costs about $130. You can spend an extra
$40 and get one with four ports, which is probably not a bad idea,
since you will probably need a small four-port network hub anyway ($50
or less) if you are going to use more than one computer with your
Linksys router. (It acts as a firewall, too.) Buying the
four-port Linksys router will save you the cost of a cross-over cable
or regular Cat 5 network cable (aprox. $10 or less), too. You
put the Linksys router between the cablemodem and your network. Get
that working with the computer(s) on your system.
- Contact http://www.tzo.com and
acquire a 30-day test URL, (like http://yourchosenname.tzo.com
). They can issue you one within 10 minutes, if you have an e-mail
address where they can send the key. You need TZO to re-route
web traffic from their DSN point to your home server. They have
a cool program that wakes up every 10 minutes to see if your cable
company has changed the IP address of your cablemodem. Cable companies
can do that at any time, if they choose to. TZO's service
assures that your system will be accessible if they change it on
you. I have noticed that my cable company hasn't changed my IP
address at all. It's good insurance, though, and I recommend
that you get it. After 30 days, you can pay TZO the going rate
(currently, about $25 for the year) or more (currently $65/year -
check their prices) if you want them to re-route a legitimate URL
address instead of the one above. They can forward http://www.yourchosenname.com
, which looks more professional. If your cable provider
gets savvy, they may try to block your ports (like 80, for
http). TZO has a service to get past that, too, albeit for a
reasonable amount more per year, if you should ever need it. If
your site gets very popular, I recommend going to the next step and
co-locating your server where it has quicker Internet backbone
connection and throughput. But, for the meantime, get it running
for peanuts.
- You will need to configure your Linksys router to
"forward" incoming port 80 requests and (a few others,
depending upon whether you will allow FTP access or are hosting
e-mail) to whatever the IP address is of the NIC card that is
installed in the computer you are using as your server (for that
function; yes you can have more than one server, one for web pages,
one for e-mail, etc.). The Linksys
router is easy to work with. Make sure you download the latest
firmware and install it to make sure you are current. In my
home, two workstations use the cablemodem line, using the above
configuration. It was necessary that I disable the DHCP server capabilities on the Linksys router. It was also
necessary that I assign a specific IP address to each computer on my
system. This was an important hurdle, because when the computers
are turned off and then back on, I don't want a random internal IP
address assigned to my server box (that's what a DHCP server
generates). For the Linksys router to work with TZO, it has to
forward it a non-random pre-determined IP address.
- I use http://www.zonelabs.com
ZoneAlarm firewall software on each system on our network. Even though the Linksys
router has a firewall, when you forward requests to a particular
computer, you need to make sure that ZoneAlarm (or whatever software
fiirewall program that you are running) allows for those ports to be
open. (Only open the ones you need.) I had to tell ZoneAlarm to
allow port 80 to be open, so that it would allow HTTP (server)
traffic.
- The next thing you need is server software. FREE is always
nice. I used http://www.analogx.com
's free SimpleServer software. It's small, downloads and
installs easily, and is a snap to use. It asks for the name of
the file to use when http requests come in. I pointed it to a
specific file on a fast harddrive, and that's all it took. With
a little effort, you can get it to load when your system comes
up. Both the TZO background program (that reports your
current IP address to their re-routing DNS server) and the
SimpleServer server program come up on boot-up, making the box easy to
administer, in the advent of a power-failure (this is
California). http://www.xitami.com
provides FREE server software too, and runs on a lot more systems,
than just Windows 98. Check out http://www.tzo.com
for their recommended server software choices, as well as alternatives
to Linksys (they have a couple). The
Analogx.com SimpleServer software is simple and allows .MPG and other
video files to
be streamed easily and is "multi-threaded," so as to allow
multiple simultaneous requests. The Xitami product is mult-threaded,
too. The SimpleServer product works nicely in the
background. If my harddrive starts crunching, I look at the
ZoneAlarm front page and see that Internet traffic is happening and
it's not some phantom program working in the background (which is not
uncommon in a Windows 98 environment).
- Make sure that your webserver computer is well backed up before
allowing hackers "a go at it." Also, install the newest server versions,
which will have fixes for hacker holes.
That's it. Inexpensive serving, using your already-paid-for cablemodem
connection. If you ever thought of hosting video content (which can
take up tons of harddrive space), it can be very affordable, if you follow
the steps above.
Once you have your site running and you want to make your streaming
entertainment available to a larger audience, consider posting your domain
name as a FREE channel reference on the Surfview Guide (TM) http://www.surfview.com/guide.htm
You can be a streaming video player with a day's worth of effort - and
very little ongoing costs. Give it a try. TZO makes it easy with
their FREE 30-day IP forwarding mechanism. Put that old computer to
use and make it your media server! Now you have virtually no excuse,
except, of course, if your cable operator doesn't offer Internet access
over cable. If they don't, bug them until they do.
Hope that helps.
James E. Tessier
Surfview.com editor
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